Young Widower: A Memoir (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize)
John W. Evans
Language: English
Pages: 200
ISBN: 0803249527
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
John W. Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania when they set off with friends to hike into the Carpathian Mountains. In an instant their life together was shattered. Katie became separated from the group. When Evans finally found her, he could only watch helplessly as she was mauled to death by a brown bear.
In such a love story, such a life story, how could a person ever move forward? That is the question Evans, traumatized and restless, confronts in this book as he learns the language of grief, the rhetoric of survival, and the contrary algorithms of holding fast and letting go. His memories of Katie and their time together, and the strangeness of his life with her family in the year after her death, create an unsentimental but deeply moving picture of loss, the brutality of nature, and the unfairness of needing to narrate a story that nothing can prepare a person to tell.
Told with unyielding witness, elegance, and care, Young Widower is a heartbreaking account of a senseless tragedy and the persistence of grief in a young person’s life.
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nights a week. Those evenings we spent in the apartment, Katie wore fleece sweatpants and made tea. She curled herself onto the ridiculous yellow-leather loveseat we inherited from previous tenants, to read books and magazines. I put my head in her lap, or we lay on the bed with the windows open, the cat teetering on the sill as we listened to the traffic, turning our pages. When it was hot in the city, we pulled the mattress under the window or set up the laptop to watch hours of television
between the two. Mine was only one side of a conversation about tics and habits, familial awkwardness, the shared generational tensions into which everyone escaped or submitted through marriage. Here I was now, after my marriage to Katie, and the story still had so many beginnings and no end. Sometimes, in therapy, it seemed as though I was speaking only in abstractions. In my Marriage, Independence accommodated Need very well and was rewarded with Companionship and sometimes even Approval. I
knew and loved: my wife. For all of us it was this Katie—wanderer or truant, prophet or prodigal—who had died on the mountain. I had a story to tell about this world and how it seemed to compulsively make sense; that it incentivized risk and accommodated broad intrusions until it decided to not be passive; that its response became overwhelming, complete, and final. Irrational and, very suddenly, deadly. I wondered what I had bartered with the universe in order to gain this sense of exception,
these interventions only mitigate the severity of the injuries that come, on hikes and runs, even long walks, more and more frequently. We arrive at the Lincolnshire a few hours ahead of the rest of her family. I am all dressed up for no good reason. I remember worrying that the mud on the shoe leather might ruin its finish, that I shouldn’t sit too long if I want everything to look freshly pressed. I stand in the pool deck, bouncing on the balls of my feet. Eventually, we check into our room
thinking of Richard, I feel closer to Katie. For a time after her death, I am very eager to hear stories about Katie’s life, especially stories about us. I think they might refresh some certainty of feeling I have yet to understand as stable, neutral memory: a glimpse of the real thing alternately revealed in parts of a whole, held back and kept together. From Teatrul Act, I walk home and sit with Katie on our balcony, watching a funeral procession and drinking cold beer. From the Lincolnshire
